It’s easy to chalk this up to personal responsibility, and while it’s straightforward to wipe your phone properly (thus disabling Activation Lock), Apple doesn’t make it abundantly clear how to do it or that you need to do it in the first place. “If it’s ever lost or stolen, they can look on a map and retrieve their lost or stolen iPhone.” “They associate it in their mind as just a retrieval tool,” Schindler says. I asked several of my iPhone-wielding friends if they knew about this, most had no idea-they only thought of Find My iPhone as a location-tracking feature. They think, ‘Oh, well, I turned the phone off, Find My iPhone must be turned off too.’ They don’t associate it with bricking the phone.” “They’re just not thinking through the steps, or don’t connect the fact that is a permanent, neverending lock on the phone. “People don’t realize that if you don’t properly reset your device, that phone is effectively bricked once you send it to me,” Schindler explains. It all comes down to a lack of education, according to Schindler. You might be wondering why thousands of iCloud-locked iPhones end up at refurbishers in the first place. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive-oh, and it’s an environmental nightmare. That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can’t reuse. In other words, they won’t be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. When you’re getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple’s Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that’s equipped with Apple’s new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock-meaning we’re about to see a lot of otherwise usable Macs heading to shredders, too.Īctivation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it’s ever lost or stolen, and it’s built into the “Find My” service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. Those iPhones, which could easily be refurbished and put back into circulation, “have to get parted out or scrapped,” all because of this anti-theft feature. “We receive four to six thousand locked iPhones per month,” laments Peter Schindler, founder and owner of The Wireless Alliance, a Colorado-based electronics recycler and refurbisher. Every month, thousands of perfectly good iPhones are shredded instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them.
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